If overcrowding were the only problem, it would be easy enough to fix. Build another jail or expand this one and we’re done. That is not the only problem, and the extent and difficulty of the repair job are what the report lays out.

The report, by a cross-section of corrections officials, lawyers and outside experts, itemizes how the jail has been asked to do much too much, to deal with the consequences of failures in Ontario’s social-welfare system, its health system, its courts.

Consider this recommendation for changing the way bail hearings work at the courthouse: “Bail cases that are not ready to proceed in the morning should be held down until later in the day. All hold down requests that are intended to facilitate the timely release of the accused should be granted by the presiding justice.”

Courtrooms, especially the ones that deal with people accused of petty crimes, are a lot more like a stereotypical Department of Motor Vehicles counter than a grand Law & Order venue. The accused line up, shuffle through, get their cases moved along or held up, next please. If something’s wrong with the paperwork or somebody isn’t ready when the case comes up, well, sorry, come back tomorrow.

Or, sometimes, go back to jail until we try again next week.

In the interim, they take up a mattress at the jail and we all pay to feed them and they clog up a system that’s having enough trouble handling the people who really need to be kept in. Meanwhile their lives on the outside start collapsing.

The task force on the jail included Ottawa’s top Crown attorney, Vikki Bair, and Dominic Lamb, representing Ottawa’s criminal defence lawyers. It did not include a judge or justice of the peace — one of the people who run bail courts and will have to act differently to fulfill this recommendation.

Another recommendation says bail-court judges shouldn’t apply bail conditions that accused people can’t meet, like curfews for homeless people or total-abstinence orders for alcoholics. Bair all but shrugged this off, though these conditions are typically imposed on Crown request.

“The Crown is not responsible ultimately for what happens, for what bail conditions are imposed. That is a decision for the jurist to make,” Bair said. “We have to make sure that vulnerable members of the community are protected … personally, I feel we do a pretty good job of that.”

This report is about overcrowding at the jail, she said, not really about bail.

“The principles that the task force has embraced are the same principles that the Crown attorney’s office has embraced and will continue to embrace,” she said. “We don’t disagree on the principles. At all.”

Right. And nobody disagrees on principles like “Justice should be done.” But the fact there isn’t automatic agreement on what that looks like is why we have a court system and centuries of lawmaking and jurisprudence and even so reasonable people disagree on what’s just and what’s unjust.

The jail needs a mental-health unit, the report says, and another “step-down unit” for inmates who aren’t in full-blown crises but can’t handle general population. It needs to do a better job of making sure inmates get prescribed medicine, too.

A stunning 50 per cent of the women in custody at the jail arrive with mental-health flags on their files. Only 22 per cent of the men do, but that proportion has more than doubled in a decade. More than half the women are addicts, and nearly half the men are.

It’s hard enough for a basically functional person with a mental illness or a drug problem or both to find his or her feet on the outside — what happens when someone who’s already in jail doesn’t get proper treatment? Exactly what you’d think. They act up, causing problems for everyone, and delay their own releases.

This will cost money, and may take help from the Ministry of Health. Naqvi said he has no cost estimates for any of the recommendations, since he only saw the report himself a couple of days ago. Those will come at some point, but Naqvi has no additional money at his disposal and will have to make the case to the province’s Treasury Board. Neither the Health Ministry nor the Treasury Board is represented on the jail task force.

The jail system has dumb features that discourage even stopgap measures to deal with overcrowding. How about this: Inmates can make collect calls to their families from jail, but those calls get dramatically more expensive if they’re moved to another provincial facility, so prisoners who want to stay in touch with people on the outside sometimes don’t want to go to a less crowded place.

What if, the report proposes, we try to keep those long-distances charges down? What if we say everyone gets one free call a week, wherever they happen to be? If you can call your mom or your boyfriend or your kids without bankrupting them, maybe a stint in Penetanguishene or Lindsay wouldn’t seem so terrible.

Who cares, you might say. These are scumbags. Why do we care about whether they’re happy about being moved? Even if we say that everyone in jail is a scumbag, it’s in our interest to help them stop being scumbags. Jail should, at the very least, not make people worse than they were going in.

As it is, what’s come to our attention as overcrowding at the Ottawa jail is really a set of problems and failings that set people on downward spirals where they become bigger and bigger problems, for themselves and for us. If only enlarging the jail were enough.

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